Consider The Lobster

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2004

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The Ethics of Meat Consumption

“Consider the Lobster” is about many topics, but most of them hinge on the ethics of consuming meat, specifically lobster. The main question Wallace asks and returns to arises at the Maine Lobster Festival but is relevant for all home cooks: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” (243). Wallace will not simply let someone dismiss the idea of lobster suffering out of hand, as when Dick (and festival literature) states “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part” (245). If that were true it would be a convenient way to dismiss the ethical stakes of the experience of pain, but even still might not be enough to justify the consumption of meat.

However, Wallace argues that lobsters do feel pain, or something like it, and he provides evidence in the form of meticulous details about the physical structure of lobsters, showing that they have characteristics that allow them to feel pain. Though they may not perceive pain in the same way we do, they contain “nociceptors and prostaglandins,” which cause the stimulus of pain (245). There is also the behavior of the lobster in the boiling pot, which makes some home cooks uncomfortable enough to leave the kitchen and which Wallace compares to how “you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water” (248). Both the fact that something makes the consumer uncomfortable and the fact that the discomfort is rooted in humanlike behavior suggest that the whole experience of killing and consuming lobster is rife with ethical dilemmas.

However, people generally do not consider those dilemmas. Wallace describes people like Dick who excuse away the discomfort with pseudoscience or the readers of Gourmet who he assumes simply ignore the issue because it is too uncomfortable. Similarly, however, he rejects the extreme certainty that PETA promotes, because morality is not black and white. Wallace instead argues that “animals are less morally important than human beings'' (253). But critically, because he cannot actually decide if lobsters can perceive pain the same way as humans do (nor if that perception alone is what matters) or if the issue comes down to some sort of “preference” lobsters have for being alive or that Gourmet readers have for consuming lobsters, Wallace does not ever define lobster killing as moral or immoral (251). Instead, he admits to not having culinary sophistication nor the ability to morally justify his own preferences for eating and enjoying certain meats beyond selfish convenience. At the end of the essay, he writes that he is “more like confused” than certain on the ethics of consuming lobsters (253). This implies that he hopes by bringing up the issue in such detail, others might decide for themselves if it’s all right to eat lobster and, if so, why. For morality, there can be no absolutes like those professed by PETA or the Maine Lobster Festival organizers, only questions and individual struggles with the implications of those questions.

The Nature of Pain

One of the ancillary issues Wallace discusses concerns the nature of pain. Most would agree that pain is bad and should not be inflicted on a living creature, but many dismiss the idea of pain when it comes to the lobster. For example, promotional materials at the Maine Lobster Festival reinforce the misguided notion that lobsters are incapable of feeling pain. By pretending that lobsters cannot feel pain, those who espouse such a belief can avoid that particular aspect their killing.

Wallace spends much of the essay proving that lobsters feel pain while distinguishing different preconditions for pain as well as different interpretations of what pain is. First, he makes clear that lobsters have the physical characteristics necessary to experience the sensation of pain. They have “an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace,” meaning they definitely feel (250). Likewise, unlike what the festival promoters argue, they do have the part of the brain that associated with feeling pain. However, it is impossible to know if their experience of pain is the same as ours or “what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain.” (246). Wallace notes that lobsters might be like lobotomized humans who neither like nor dislike pain; rather they “feel [pain] but don’t feel anything about it” (251). This opens up another distinction between “(1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering,” and Wallace suggests that the notion of pain itself is somewhat plastic or, at least, subjective (251).

For Wallace, the perception of pain may simply come down to a being’s “preference” in avoiding its sensation, a fact he explains is easier to understand in the negative (251). He uses the example of a worm cut in half which continues to function as though it were not cut. That suggests that the worm does not prefer the experience of not being cut. However, he also notes that lobsters do have preferences for being alone, for being in cold water, and for not being boiled alive, as is evidenced by their fierce efforts to free themselves from the pot.

Still, he asks if that reaction indicates real suffering or merely some sort of “rudimentary” version of suffering, wondering as well if rudimentary suffering really is distinct from human suffering or why such a distinction should matter (252). As with so much of the text, these are questions he does not answer.

Consumerism

The reason Wallace begins to consider the ethics of killing and eating a lobster is the extravagance of the Maine Lobster Festival. The festival is designed to wring money from tourists, and Wallace seems immediately upset by that notion, complaining about the extra costs ($20 for a folding chair, for instance) and the various “irksome little downers” including inadequate utensils, lousy beverage choices, and aggressive crowds (239). He also describes local residents who do not attend and juxtaposes them with what he derisively calls a “demilocal”—a seasonal Maine resident— who complains only of being accosted by PETA protesters (244). Wallace is clearly more critical of the demilocal’s opinion than he is of the cabdriver’s or rental car agent’s in part because the former sees lobster purely as a consumable bit of pleasure. The locals, on the other hand, are dependent on lobster to make their living (the cabdriver directly makes money by driving tourists around, and the rental car agent has lobstermen in his family, so they are not purely consumers).

Wallace is also critical of the festival organizers (the Maine Lobster Promotion Council) who have promoted lies about lobster pain and created the cruel spectacle of the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker because they have a vested interest in selling and advertising lobster. While the lobstermen who can be seen emptying their vessels on the festival grounds depend on lobster for their livelihoods, the person buying a cheap lobster from the giant cooker is engaged in an act of consumption that makes a spectacle out of a creature’s pain.

It is interesting to Wallace that lobster has only recently been perceived as a luxury good and that there were laws outlawing prisoners from being fed too much lobster two centuries ago. This fact implies something about the subjectivity of what is consumed and why. Since lobster is largely for the luxury of eating it, one should have to explain morally why it is okay to cause a lobster pain. Wallace is interested in the attitudes of the consumers in his audience: the readership of Gourmet. He imagines that they (like the Food & Wine editor he envisions) would not actually like the Maine Lobster Festival of its inconveniences. However, he also asks those readers to go beyond mere consumption and prove themselves to be actual gourmets—not people who eat food because of its taste and presentation, but people who are “extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about [their] food and its overall context” (254). Being that attentive would justify the consumption or at least distinguish a potentially good consumer from a bad one. If such a consumer existed, perhaps Wallace would have less criticism of consumerism overall.